On a table near the desk in his apartment, Finch has a map of Ambergris from before the Rising. It covers the whole table, renders the city in perfect detail. He has no idea what it’s made of. Never tears. Never wrinkles. His father had given it to him when he was thirteen. “You’ll never need another.” Made a mark on it with a green pen every time he sent his son on an errand to a new location. Insisted Finch take the map with him everywhere. Even though it was heavy. Even if Finch had been to a place before. “The streets are shifty. I want to make sure you don’t get lost.”

The errands? Collect letters. Drop off packages. Say a single word or phrase. “Shipping lanes.” “The weather is too cold for this time of year.” “Mr. Green says you are a lucky man.” Never to the same people. Old, young, male, female, each one with secrets behind their eyes. He played it like a game. Delighted in the mystery of not really knowing the rules. Then he’d return, a human homing pigeon, to their house.

“Official business,” his father said. He held an important position for H&S because he was a war hero. Anyone could tell that from all the photographs of him fighting against the Kalif, and from the people who came over to visit. Some of them wearing funny hats and uniforms.

But by the time Finch was seventeen, his father had stopped sending him on these errands. He’d felt discarded. Hadn’t understood then that his father had turned to others when Finch began to ask questions. When he began to have a sense of the secrecy behind his missions. A tallish, dark-haired, serious boy with few close friends his age, taught at home by his father. Those journeys across the city had meant a lot to him.

But he’d kept the map, used it for his new job, which his father had gotten for him. Courier for Hoegbotton business interests. Running invoices and shipping inventories between the main offices and the warehouses at the docks. Sometimes, if the conflict heated up, if F&L cut off certain roads, he had to find alternate routes.

Trade “has to keep on an even keel, no matter what,” his boss Wyte liked to say. Wyte, seven years his senior, with an office in the brick building on Albumuth they’d both work at after the Rising. Even then Wyte had seemed too large for the world around him. Desk too small. Him too clumsy. But to Finch he’d been the height of authority.

The map shows that brick building, with a green mark by it. It also has detailed views of the Bureaucratic Quarter, the Religious Quarter, and what had unofficially been known as the Merchant Quarter before the wars. Albumuth Boulevard, the great snake wending its way through almost every part of the city. The valley that had been the home of so many citizens. The docks. The swampland to the north.